Merry Christmas

This is a great time to start thinking about offering Christmas cards to your readers.

Here's what you need to know...

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Hitch It / Ditch It: Tiger Thighs, Toc Tic, A La Mode, Decrypting Rita

Here's the second installment of this year's Hitch It / Ditch It critiques.

Bridgette's Belly

Toc Tic

A La Mode

Decrypting Rita

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Character Tags in Comic Easel

Since switching to Comic Easel, I've become a big fan of character tags. Using character tags, I can give readers more information about the characters that appear in a specific update. You can see it in action below.

 

When the user hovers the cursor over the headshot, they get a brief intro to the character.

And clicking the headshot takes the user to an archive thumbnail page containing all of the tagged appearances of that charater.

Here's how to set it up in Comic Easel. I'm assuming that the updated version of ComicsPress has a similar functionality.

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Creating a Halftone Pattern for Print *and* Web

A while back, I posted a piece by member Christ Hart, who shared his process for creating halftones for his comic. Halftones are greys that are created by small, solid black dots (or sometimes lines or other shapes). A halftone closely replicates the type of gray that was achieved by using Zip-a-tone.

Why halftones?

Why use a halftone? Well, back in the day, photostat machines were geared at creating image of straight black and white -- with no grays -- for reproduction. It photographed better and it printed more easily. And so a few industrious folks realized that one could simulate a continuous gray tone by breaking the area into a series of solid black dots.

And that's what a halftone is -- a mass of dots, arranged in rows that fool our naked eyes into seeing a contunuous gray tone.

The more dots, the more detail was possible. That's called resolution. We still talk about resolution in terms of DPI (Dots Per Inch) rather than the more accurrate PPI (pixels per inch). Likewise, the closer together we arrange those dots, the less our nakes eyes are able to perceive them as rows of dots. That's called Line Per Inch (LPI).

Now, here's the rub. As great as this system was, it had one fatal flaw: Reducing the size of a halftone image brought some dots closer to dots in other rows (and increased the spacing between other dots and the dots in neighboring rows). Now, our eyes can be easily fooled into see gray, but they're fantastic at seeing patterns. And once those dots aren't evenly spaced anymore, they create patterns. They're called moiré patterns, and they're distracting as heck.

You can decrease the likelihood of creating a moiré patten by adding more space between the rows of dots -- in other words, decreasing the LPI. The more space, the harder it is to form patterns.

The guide Chris posted was decidedly aimed at getting good results in print, but getting that result to transfer to the Web is pretty complicated.

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Saturday Deep dive: Art 101, Proportion problem? Quick fix

Today's dive into the deeper archive of Webcomics.com takes us to Sept. 15, 2010, when we discussed improving your basic drawing skills.

So, even though you've studied the guide to drawing bodies in proportion, you still look back on your finished work and see errors in your proportions. Especially this one: The head is big and the body gets progressively out-of-proportion the further down the drawing goes.

Participate in the discussion under the original thread.